Items, such as goods and real estate, are usually held open for inspection or sale in one of two ways. The first, a traditional approach, includes holding an inventory of the items at a physical location. This approach involves visiting a dealer or merchant's place of business, listening to a salesperson's pitch, viewing or testing selected goods, and then haggling over price. Similarly, consumers purchase real estate by the traditional approach by visiting and touring the real estate and then haggling over price. This approach advantageously provides consumers an opportunity to view the particular product or real estate in-person and receive hands-on demonstrations of features and options or the ability to view it in its entirety. However, this approach is time-consuming and interacting with a salesperson can be intimidating for many consumers.
The second approach involves a “virtual showroom” in which items are held in an inventory where consumers can research and price goods, real estate, and the like on the Internet. This approach advantageously allows consumers to search for items for sale, such as goods or real estate, in less time and with less salesperson interaction than the traditional approach. Unfortunately, when visiting a virtual showroom, consumers are often limited to stock photographs and generic information and must forego the more traditional “walk around” experience. Consequently, even if actual photographs and/or videos of a particular product, real estate, or the like are available, they are often limited in scope and cannot adequately convey how a product or real estate appears in-person and its actual condition. For example, the information available is often non-specific and relates generally to a make and model rather than specifically to the particular item. In other words, consumers sacrifice advantageous aspects of the traditional goods or real estate purchasing approach in order to enjoy the convenience and other advantages of the virtual showroom approach.
Moreover, many virtual showroom sellers often employ a “no haggle” pricing model. As a result, it becomes important for virtual sellers to make a high volume of sales. A virtual showroom seller attempting to make a high volume of sales must quickly acquire information about goods or real estate in its inventory, including photographs, videos, and/or other information indicative of the condition of the goods or real estate, and make that information available to consumers on the Internet. Conventional systems and methods are unable to acquire photographs and/or videos of goods or real estate and post them on the Internet with the necessary throughput to keep up with the quick turnaround of high-volume sales.
In addition, the limited scope of information available about items in a virtual showroom leads to increased bandwidth usage in communications networks, such as the Internet, increased processing load in devices hosting the virtual showroom, and decreased power availability in batteries powering devices on which the virtual showroom is displayed. For example, the limited scope of information provides fewer categories with which to distinguish among item entries in the virtual showroom. Accordingly, more entries will satisfy a consumer's desired criteria, which lead to more entries being accessed and displayed.